Lotta Folley’s head raised and across the open expanse of snow her eyes found Dard’s strained face. He made no move in a last desperate attempt to escape notice. After all he was in the half-shadow of the shelter, she might not see him— the protective “playing dead” of an animal.
But her eyes widened, her full mouth shaped a soundless expression of astonishment. With a kind of pain he waited for her to cry out.
Only she made no sound at all. After the first moment of surprise her face assumed its usual stupid, slightly sullen solidity. She brushed some snow from the front of her jacket without looking at it, and when she spoke in her hoarse common voice, she might have been addressing the tree at her side.
“The Peacemen are huntin’.”
Dard made no answer. She pouted her lips and added,
“They’re huntin’ you.”
He still kept silent. She stopped brushing her jacket and her eyes wavered around the flees and brush walling in the old road.
“They say as how your brother’s a stinkman—”
"Stinkman,” the opprobious term for a scientist. Dard continued to hold his tongue. But her next question surprised him.
“Dessie— Dessie all right?”